"Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life." Germaine GreerI like these words. They remind me of Helen Keller's great quote relating how security is an allusion. That either life is a daring adventure or it is nothing.
Which it so totally is. As we are all witnessing-the desire to be safe has a direct cost. If that terrible balance is upset, panic follows and this creates even more uncertainty.
Think of the current implosion of credit markets. They are all based upon the myth of certainty. They don't call these devises "securities" for nothing. But as we've recently seen-there is little in our world that is truly able to overcome the winds of change and uncertainty.
As we we've watched as the US does a great imitation of the lead up to the Great Depression, see how fragile security is indeed! The sub prime melt down infects the prime mortgage markets. The credit card markets follow, which infects the student loan markets, and auto loans aren't too far behind. As credit constricts, additional panic sets in and were it not for the intervention of numerous foreign investors a couple weeks ago, many of our nations largest banks would have declared insolvency. Too bad the
CEO's of these institutions won't ever be held accountable for their mismanagement.
Wall street sold the security of these investments, with letters like "AAA rated" branded on products that were as hollow as a chocolate Easter Bunny.
These ploy's mirror other devises meant to reassure us.
Words like "Homeland Security", "Rendition" and "War on Terror" come to mind. This focus group tested
branding was also created to make us feel safer-even though we really weren't. As long as we were duck taping ourselves into oblivion we could ignore Afghanistan. As long as we were kidnapping people off the street in foreign countries, torturing them, and even murdering a few, we could stand
courageously and confident that we'd protected our way of life. As long as we could spy on each other and listen to each other's conversations, we could prevent another reckoning with terror. Yet we aren't safer. We never will be. It is an illusion that only keeps us distracted from the greater threat. As long as we can bait and switch the term
du jour and land on no fly lists and take off our shoes in airport lines and dump our shampoo out and dance and sing about an unending war of no conscience while we have millions of nameless strangers in our land, we are not safe.
If anything the Republicans have become the great party of Let's Make A Deal. Trade off one known for an even more dangerous unknown. We never really know what the threat is behind door number 3, but we know it has to be better than the threat we are holding in our hand.
Here's another example of baiting and switching security: The dishonest Republican march to privatization. It's an irresponsible theory packaged as "Safer", "More Efficient" and "More Flexible"-capitalism's ultimate embrace to uplift the
entrepreneurial spirit.
Yet p
rivate enterprise did not
solely create our power grid, our transportation networks, and the education of the masses. Public investment and the taxpayers were far larger partners.
Now those who dislike centralized accountability threaten to dismantle what so many of us take for granted. There is no accountability if you are of this mindset. We can not have entire, very necessary parts of our economy, dependent on foxes watching the hen house. Sometimes my dear, smaller-is-better government converts there is a role for government to play. One that keeps greed, dishonesty, and profit gouging corporate speculators evenly matched with their bureaucratic counterparts. The consumers can benefit when monopolies and consolidation are kept at bay.
Sometimes, God forbid, it takes those without a profit motive to keep us safe from the worst of Wall street corporate board room inspired
indulgences. Think Libby or Butte Montana. Think Enron or Montana Power. Think World Com or even Bank of America's recent Credit Card practises- their shameless practise of suddenly rising the credit rates of good consumers, who pay on time, into the 30%
APR range.
Thank God this rotten theory of deregulation only managed to get a tiny foothold into the regulated economy under Republican regimes. Remember when they wanted to
privatize Social Security? Sell off the entire powergrid? Deregulate media ownership? Wherever deregulation and
privatization prevails, we eventually see the downwind effects.
The rush to deregulate utilities has been a disaster. So too the deregulation of the transportation industry-especially trucking and the airlines. Flown lately? Been stuck on plane, treated like a hostage? Worked for a trucking company who isn't required to make sure their employees make minimum wage? Pumped "hot fuel" that rips you off?
What about the ongoing attempt to
privatize the Interstate Highway System and sell off our national infrastructure to Wall Street and foreign toll operators? What about the performance based illusion of
privatizing schools, and the rush to "manage" health care? All of these
endeavors promised and sometimes even briefly delivered investors enormous profits but little in the way of direct benefit to consumers. These efforts were always marketed with consumer confidence and security as the acheivable outcome. So how secure do you feel now?
If nothing else the
privatization of "security forces" in Iraq demonstrates the greatest folly of the simplistic Republican mindset. Any time the public good, necessary services, and economy sustaining portions of society become sustained by trust in top down, profit focused, unaccountable leadership-leadership that looks only as far ahead as the next quarters results, we loose any sense of a sustainable future. This is the trend that has landed "outsourcing" and "free trade" on our shores, where we export the very wages that sustain our economy.
Security is an allusion. But even more so is any sense that unregulated profitability is a
gauge to the worth of an endeavor or a significant statement of the nobility of
any achievement. If the nobility of business ethic is the truest reflection of a sure thing, then in the world of economic certainty, what a difference a quarterly report makes.
Helen Keller had it right. Every endeavor is daring risk, no matter how creatively the odds are branded, bonded, and labeled. To have faith in profit as the ultimate gain, is to leverage security with an embrace of unforseeable outcomes and a daring disrespect for history.
And these days, as we are painfully learning, Security isn't exactly something you can take to the bank. Neither are the Republicans-at least not if you expect to have anything left in your account.
